to put her out.  The man, a nobleman in plush, moved by his young mistress’s utter misery, would not obey though it cost him his place, and the harder-hearted father himself thrust his starving child into the cold street, into the drizzling rain, and slammed the door upon her cries of agony.  The footman slipped out after her, and five shillings—­a large sum for him—­found its way from his kind hand to hers.  Now the common ending might have come; now starvation, the slow, unwilling, recourse to more shame and deeper vice; then the forced hilarity, the unreal smile, which in so many of these poor creatures hides a canker at the heart; the gradual degradation—­lower still and lower—­oblivion for a moment sought in the bottle—­a life of sin and death ended in a hospital.  The will of Providence turned the frolic of three voluptuaries to good account; the prince gave his purse-full, Sheridan his one last guinea for her present needs:  the name of the good-hearted Plush was discovered, and he was taken into Carlton House, where he soon became known as Roberts, the prince’s confidential servant:  and Sheridan bestirred himself to rescue for ever the poor lady, whose beauty still remained as a temptation.  He procured her a situation, where she studied for the stage, on which she eventually appeared.  ‘All’s well that ends well:’  her secret was kept, till one admirer came honourably forward.  To him it was confided, and he was noble enough to forgive the one false step of youth.  She was well married, and the boy for whom she had suffered so much fell at Trafalgar, a lieutenant in the navy.

To better men such an adventure would have been a solemn warning; such a tale, told by the ruined one herself, a sermon, every word of which would have clung to their memories.  What effect, if any, it may have had on Blackstock and his companions must have been very fleeting.

It is not so very long since the Seven Dials and St. Giles’ were haunts of wickedness and dens of thieves, into which the police scarcely dared to penetrate.  Probably their mysteries would have afforded more amusement to the artist and the student of character than to the mere seeker of adventure, but it was still, I remember, in my early days, a great feat to visit by night one of the noted ‘cribs’ to which ’the profession’ which fills Newgate was wont to resort.  The ‘Brown Bear,’ in Broad Street, St. Giles’, was one of these pleasant haunts, and thither the three adventurers determined to go.  This style of adventure is out of date, and no longer amusing.  Of course a fight ensued, in which the prince and his companions showed immense pluck against terrible odds, and in which, as one reads in the novels of the ‘London Journal’ or ‘Family Herald,’ the natural superiority of the well-born of course displayed itself to great advantage.  Surely Bulwer has described such scenes too graphically in some of his earlier novels to make a minute description here at all necessary; but the